So, I kinda follow Saudi Arabian politics because of my following of World Soccer, heh. Mongrel, what is happening in Saudi Arabia is actually interesting and a bit more colored than coup attempts. So, The King of Saudi Arabia and head of the House of Saud is old and has Alzheimer's, now one of the last things he did before his Alzheimer's was discovered and effectively took him out of power was to completely strip the previous Crown Prince, Muhammed Bin Nayef, a conservative islamic politician and nephew of his who was highly unpopular with young Saudi people(Who want to be a more moderate and liberal islamic state) from power and place his favorite son, Mohammad Bin Salman, into the position of Crown Prince.

Now the New Crown Prince is effectively ruling Saudi Arabia due to his father's medical problems and he is a very, by Saudi standards, liberal politician. Before he was made the Crown Prince he led a ton of reforms such as effectively restricting the power of the religious police, he was making the first steps to move Saudi Arabia away from being SOLELY controlled and economically dependent on Oil Money with new financial reforms. He was also the spearhead in the movement to allow Saudi females the ability to drive and to lessen other social restrictions on the youth of his country, and when he was effectively thrust into power this year by the one-two punch of his father's alzheimer's and being named the new Crown Prince everyone was wondering if he was going to stop with these reforms because, frankly it is very dangerous in that part of the world to be as liberal as he is.

Cut to October, he releases a public statement saying that the current Ultra Conservative State of Saudi Arabia is NOT NORMAL and that the Saudi state has been in a crisis for 30+ years and needs to be more liberal and moderate. It needs to accept other religions, it needs to allow foreign investors and foreign people into the country without the restrictions currently placed on them. He then proceeded to publicly break the Alliance between the religious clerics and the House of Saud and form a foreign investment fund and a social reformation fund. Read about it at this link https://tinyurl.com/y7g4m3cf

Now, in response to that he's caught a lot of flack from other government officials. People refusing to do what they have been ordered to do on religious grounds and a bunch of other stuff. Also, tons of rich people who kinda think his new way of doing shit might make them less rich. Earlier this year he formed an Anti-Corruption Committee... cut to yesterday and he kinda used the Saudi police in a way that 'Helps?!?' his liberal reform by just having them arrest every Saudi politician that his committee had found grounds for corruption due to economic and religious reasons. I can't say if it's a good thing or a bad thing but Yesterday's actions in Saudi Arabia weren't really a coup so much as the Crown Prince arresting half of his cabinet and reshuffling the government in a way that consolidates the power where he wants it, Under him and in control of the more liberal politicians so he can move his plans forwards... I'm kinda just hoping that if he REALLY does want to make the Saudi state a less conservative hell hole, and I'm not sure he does, that he doesn't end up getting himself assassinated with all this before he can make headway because the person they would get in there if that happens would probably be a lot more in line with the old way of thinking. Which, you can also read about here https://tinyurl.com/yddwycs4 (Both articles use the same picture of him but they are different articles)

Like I said though, I'm not sure what I think about the arrests or what's happening. Basically I HOPE that this all ends with a more moderate and more accepting Saudi Arabia that can grow beyond the ultra conservative state it has been but I don't know if this is the way it should be brought about.

I kind of knew some of that, that the king had Alzheimers and that there has been a conservative vs. liberal factional shadow struggle going on centred around family ties (I read that the groups of sons involved were considered members of different "branches" of the House of Saud due to their being the sons of different wives? I think? So there's also a clannish aspect to this?).

But that's a lot more detail than I knew about. I didn't realize how hell-bent on social reform bin Salman was, or that the economic reforms were going so far - I guess they're taking a page from Dubai and trying to think about a future where they can't depend on oil, which is a Very Good Idea.

As the Guardian article says, it's a practical problem for them too, since they have a huge youth population who currently have no future to look forward to and a smart king knows what that usually means for ruling houses. Getting them jobs and freer lives would be a hell of a lot better than what Saudi Arabia's done in the past with idle, angry youth, shipping them off to be some other poor country's problem.

In fairness though there is clearly also just plain old money and family politics being played here, Alwaleed bin Talal is, again by Saudi standards, on of the most liberal princes in the country but he also pledged to give away all 32 BILLION dollars of his personal wealth when he dies and so he gets arrested.

Joxam wrote:In fairness though there is clearly also just plain old money and family politics being played here, Alwaleed bin Talal is, again by Saudi standards, on of the most liberal princes in the country but he also pledged to give away all 32 BILLION dollars of his personal wealth when he dies and so he gets arrested.

Yeah, I guess that's where the clan stuff comes in. Given how freaking HUGE the House of Saud is, with all its manifold princes, I'd be flabbergasted if there wasn't any extended family intrigue.

The leaked reports are becoming more detailed, stating that McMaster is the main hawk pushing Trump. The article also reminds us that Tillerson could be fired at any moment, and the current guess is he would be replaced by Mike Pompeo, who shares McMaster's view rather than Tillerson's.

That would leave Mattis as the lone voice of sanity in the wilderness. I guess we can figure out how things would then go if Kim decided he wanted to play the odds again.

Let us say that I am professionally offended by this design. I would be offended to see something so incoherent in a dropdown on an e-mail form; it's appalling that somebody did such a shoddy job on something so goddamn important.

The Honolulu Civil Beat noted in a story on Sunday that the employee who made the choice from the nearly unintelligible list has been temporarily reassigned within the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency (HI-EMA), and his status at the agency will be decided after a review. The news outlet wrote that according to Emergency Management Agency Administrator Vern Miyagi, the employee "felt terrible about the mistake."

It's not the user's fault. (Hell, I routinely confuse the generate-sources and generate-resources goals in Maven -- though I gotta say, if I knew getting it wrong would send out a missile warning, I would ask somebody before choosing one.) It may not be the dev's, either; it's entirely possible that somebody told the dev he had to use that specific language. (The lady giving me the specs for the site I was building at Intel once got very snippy with me when I tried to talk her out of a navbar with 60 links spread across a menu that went 4 levels deep.)

Aside from the shitty UI, it shouldn't have taken 40 fucking minutes to issue a followup explaining it was a false alarm. Japan had a similar scare yesterday and corrected it within 10 minutes. Which still sounds too long to me.

I talked to my mom about it the other night. She didn't get the warning because she's out of cell range; she said my brother assumed correctly that it was a false alarm (he's a hard guy to rattle) but that his girlfriend was pretty freaked out.

The joke is, like an HIV test coming up positive, it's far more likely to be a false positive than you actually have HIV.

I'm not saying that when the real missiles come people won't believe the warning, but if you're anything like Thad's brother or just understand how shit works (its far more likely that a missile warning is a false alarm) then a warning is just useless to you, because you will always correctly assume that it's far more likely for it to be a mistake.

My buddy who works for the Florida government was suggesting it's also a possibility that the original Devs made a nice clear page but that at some point an employee "on the other side of the building" set up a page of links as a workaround to "make things easier".

With the yield of the modern nuclear weapon payload, is there really a point to civil defense warnings for ballistic missiles?

A quick google search suggests that a modern nuke is going to be 80 to a hundred times more powerful than Nagasaki's Fat Man. If you can hear the siren, it's hard to imagine that you can evacuate before being vaporized. Especially in a place like Hawaii or Japan.

The fucking incompetents of the people who “accidentally” sent this alert (I assume civil defense)

This isn’t just some fucking “mistake” as they put it, it’s probably as bad of a “mistake” as you can make. When people are crying and calling me and asking if it’s gunna be okay and fucking confessing things to me before they are (to their knowledge) about to die, then only are to find out the multiple alerts are just “mistakes” THATS A HUGE FUCKING PROBLEM

IM SICK AND TIRED OF THE AMERICAN FORCES GETTING A PASS ON THEIR BULLSHIT BECAUSE IT MEANS THIS SHIT CAN HAPPEN

IT MEANS THAT THIS SHIT HAPPENED AROUND HALF AN HOUR AGO AND I HAVENT SEEN ANY OFFICIAL APOLGIES OR EVEN ACKNOWLEDGEMENT FROM THE MILITARY, CIVIL DEFENSE, OR THE GOVERNMENT BESIDES A SIMPLE MESSAGE READING “ it was a mistake”

There isn’t even a “breaking news” section on YouTube for fucks sake

Just goes to show that Hawaii is thought of as nothing but land

No culture, no people, to America it’s just land valuable enough to protect for its convenience, but the people mean nothing

Don’t worry America, we forgive you for illegally annexing us, and killing our culture, and our native people, and using our land for money, and doing your own uranium bomb testing right here over our sacred mountain and our delicate watershed, so thanks for threatening us with nuclear bombs, fucking thanks